by Dave Duncan
Past Imperative
Round One of the Great Game
Dave Duncan
Contents
Foreword to the 2009 Edition
Vale West
Vale East
Translator’s Note
The Gods
The Trong Troupe
Overture
1
2
3
Act I
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Act II
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Act III
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
Act IV
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Act V
52
53
54
55
56
Curtain
57
58
59
End of Round One
Acknowledgements
Foreword to the 2009 Edition
“The Great Game” series is set during the First World War, but most of the action takes place on a world called Nextdoor, where pseudo-gods play vicious games with mortals to while away eternity. You may read into this any moral or religious message you want, but it was intended only to entertain. The title comes from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and T’Lin Dragontrader bears no small resemblance to Mahbub Ali, Kim’s horse-dealer friend. Those are about the only direct references to Victorian or Edwardian stories that I recall inserting, so don’t treat these as puzzle books, fictional romans à clef. Nevertheless, I wrote them partly as an experiment in nostalgia.
No, I am not old enough to remember the First World War, but I do remember the Second and the years of shortage that followed it. Books were hard to come by in Britain during my childhood and much of what I read then was already very old—works by Jules Verne, H G Wells, R M Ballantyne, Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard. I did read some Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, but only because I was forced to. Among the “later” books I recall are Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Gods of Mars (1918) and David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Not least among the hints I picked up from those particular stories is that there are many ways to travel to other worlds.
“The Great Game” has been out of print for about ten years, and I read it over again in anticipation of its reissue. I won’t offer a detailed critique, because it would be vain of me to list all the good features and folly to mention the bad ones. You can find those for yourself. But I will mention two aspects that took me by surprise. First, I admired the extent to which the plot is driven by the magic, which I regard as a mark of good fantasy. Magic can never be described as believable, but it must be consistent, and it should meld reasonably with the politics and religion of the world. In this case the nodes and “charisma” fit well together. (Charisma is probably the closest we come to genuine magic in this mundane world of ours—how else can you explain the way a psychopathic runt like Adolf Hitler could cow a room full of Prussian generals?) In the final book, there are hints that nodes have been created by human worship, which I probably did not suggest sooner in case it gave away too much of the magic too soon. Or maybe I just didn’t think of it then.
There is a third strand of magic that I will return to in a moment.
Secondly, I was annoyed by the way the hero in Past Imperative was left waiting in the wings far too long before being allowed out on stage. This is normally a fault in a story, but I committed this sin because I felt modern readers would need to be prepared for a hero as perfect as Edward. If he seems too good at times, it is because heroes of that time were always too good to be true, and not only in fiction. It was youngsters of his generation who marched at the head of their men into the barbed wire and machine gun fire of the trenches. They really believed what they said about honor and duty; they lived and died for them.
The story is set on two worlds, and this is another tribute to the past. Until J R R Tolkien, fantasy worlds were normally related in some way to this, the real world. For example in the classic, The Worm Ouroboros, Eddison mentions that it is set on the planet Mercury. As both reader and writer I have a soft spot for two-world fantasies. They make the other place more credible by letting the reader see it from our terrestrial viewpoint, as when Edward decides that the Vales are almost ready for an industrial revolution.
More important in this story, though, is that Edward can be shown as an “Edwardian” hero. Yes, he would love to stay and explore this new world, as any normal youngster would, but he is driven by his imprinted sense of duty to return to Earth. An author’s hardest job is to make the characters want what he or she wants them to want. It is Edward’s stiff-upper-lip training that motivates him, and it is the third strand of magic that I mentioned, the “chain of prophecy” feature, that drives Zath. Their life-and-death struggle is inevitable because they are equally opposed to the Filoby Testament and it requires that one or other of them must die.
“The Great Game” required a lot more research than most fantasy does. I made the terrestrial story as accurate as I could, although sometimes I had to guess. How much did tourists really pay to visit Stonehenge in 1914? I have no idea. But just about everything else I wrote about Stonehenge is accurate, even to the style of fence around it in 1914, which I discovered in an old photograph of troops drilling on Salisbury Plain.
Finally, I must say that I am very happy to see these books back in print. I do not normally whine about editors and publishers, but this series was cursed by too many changes of both. The second and third hard covers were not the same size as the first, which you may not see as a serious problem, but it upsets collectors. The third volume was given cover art that differed in style from the first two, and then its mass market reprint (which is where the money comes from) was given a cover so totally unlike everything that had gone before that many fans failed to identify it as part of the series. Before the word could get around, a new owner pulped the warehouse stock and the books were out of print.
I think this series deserved better. I hope you will agree.
— Dave Duncan
Vale West
Vale East
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot.
SHAKESPEARE
Henry V, III, i
“Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot.”
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Return of Sherlock Holmes:
“Adventure of the Abbey Grange”
Hear all peoples, and rejoice all lands, for the slayer of Death comes, the Liberator, the son of Kameron Kisster. In the seven hundredth Festival, he shall come forth in the land of Suss. Naked and crying he shall come into the world and Eleal shall wash him. Sh
e shall clothe him and nurse him and comfort him. Be merry and give thanks; welcome this mercy and proclaim thine deliverance, for he will bring death to Death.
The Filoby Testament, 368
Translator’s Note
In Joalian and related dialects, a geographic name usually consists of a root modified by a prefix. English equivalents (for example Narshland, Narshvale, Narshia, etc.) fail to convey all the subtleties of the original. Joalian alone has twelve words to describe a mountain pass, depending on its difficulty, but no word for a mountain range.
The flora and fauna of the Vales are quite unrelated to terrestrial types, but convergent evolution has tended to fill similar ecological niches with species of similar appearance. Form follows function—a beetle is more or less a beetle anywhere, airborne species lay eggs so that they need not be burdened with immature young, and so on. To avoid overloading the reader’s memory with names and the page with italics, I have either coined descriptive terms (“bellfruit”) or assigned names on the basis of appearance. A rose is a rose is, sort of, a rose. The correspondence may be superficial; a “moa” is a bipedal mammal.
Time and distance have been converted to familiar units.
Spelling has been made as phonetic as possible, based on common English pronunciation. G is hard; c is used only in ch, x and q not at all.
Masculine gender words begin with hard consonants (b,d,g,k,p,t), feminine with vowels or aspirates (a,e,i,o,u,y,h), and neuter with soft consonants (f,j,l,m,n,r,s,th). Abstract concepts have their own declensions and begin with v,ch,w, or z.
Dissimilar vowels are pronounced separately, as if marked with a dieresis: Eleal is pronounced El-eh-al, not Eleel. Double vowels indicate a long sound: aa as in late, ee as in feet, ii as in fight, oo as in goat, uu as in boot.
The English word candle is pronounced cand’l. Joalian contains many such unvoiced vowels, which are indicated with an apostrophe. The initial consonant in D’ward would be stressed more than in English dwarf.
The Gods
The five great gods of the Pentatheon are—
Visek The Supreme Parent is often regarded as male, but also as a triad: Father, Mother, and First Source. Visek may be spoken of in the singular or plural, as masculine, feminine, or abstract in ways that will not readily translate into English. The Light, the All-Knowing, the Father of Gods, etc., may take on attributes of other deities, such as wisdom, creation, justice. There are hints of monotheism in Visek worship. Except in Niol, where his main temple stands, Visek seems too remote and abstract a god to be truly popular with the masses. He is associated with the sun, fire, silver, and the color white.
His many avatars include Chiol (destiny) and Wyseth (the sun).
Eltiana The Lady is goddess of love, motherhood, passion, childbirth, crops, agriculture, transition. Her clergy wear red; her symbol is Ø and her main temple is at Randor. She is the only major deity to be directly identified with one of the four moons.
Her avatars include Ois, goddess of mountain passes.
Karzon The Man is the god of creation and destruction, and thus of war, strength, courage, virility, vengeance, pestilence, nature, and animal husbandry. His clergy wear green, his symbol is a hammer. His main temple is at Tharg and he is associated with the moon Trumb.
As Zath he is god of death, and hence the most feared of the gods. Then his color is black and his symbol a skull. Other avatars include Garward (strength), Ken’th (virility), and Krak’th (earthquakes).
Astina The Maiden is goddess of purity, duty, justice, patron of warriors and athletes. Her clergy wear blue and her symbol is a five-pointed star. Her main sanctuary is at Joal. She is associated with Ysh, the blue moon.
Her avatars include Iilah (athletes), Irepit (repentance), Ysh (constancy and duty), and Ursula (justice).
Tion The Youth is god of art, beauty, science, knowledge, healing. His clergy wear yellow. His main temple is at Suss. The unpredictable yellow moon Kirb’l is identified with his avatar the god of humor.
His avatars include Ember’l (drama), Kirb’l (the Joker), Gunuu (courage), Yaela (singing), and Paa (healing).
The Trong Troupe
Trong Impresario
Ambria Impresario, Trong’s second wife
K’linpor Actor, Trong’s son
Halma Actor, K’linpor’s wife
Uthiam Piper, Ambria’s daughter
Golfren Piper, Uthiam’s husband
Yama Actor, Ambria’s cousin
Dolm Actor, Yama’s husband
Piol Poet, brother of Ambria’s first husband
Gartol Costumer, Trong’s cousin
Olimmiar Dancer, Halma’s sister
Klip Trumpeter, Gartol’s stepbrother
Eleal Singer, an orphan
Overture
1
THE SUMMER OF 1914 WAS THE FINEST IN LIVING MEMORY. All over Europe the sun shone, day after day, from a sky without a cloud. Holidaymakers traveled as they wished across a continent at peace, reveling in green woods and clean, warm seas. They crossed national borders unimpeded. Almost no one noticed the storm building on the political horizon; even newspapers mostly ignored it. The war struck with the suddenness of an avalanche and carried everything away.
There was never to be another summer like it.
Toward the end of June in that year the Greek steamship Hermes, preparing to depart from Port Said and having a vacant stateroom, embarked at short notice a gentleman whose name was entered in the log as Colonel Julius Creighton. He was polite and aloof and inscrutable. During the crossing of the Mediterranean, he remained extremely reticent about both himself and his business. He was without question an English milord, but beyond that obvious deduction, neither the officers nor the other passengers were able to progress. Everyone was intrigued when he chose to disembark at Cattaro, in Montenegro, which was not on the road to anywhere. The English, they agreed, were crazy. They would all have been considerably more surprised had they been able to follow his subsequent travels.
He set foot on European soil on the twenty-eighth of June, which by coincidence was the day Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s death in Sarajevo opened the first crack of the collapse that was to bring down the whole world. The Montenegro border was less than fifty miles from Sarajevo. The reader is therefore cautioned that Colonel Creighton had absolutely nothing to do with the assassination.
He progressed rapidly north and east, traveling mainly on horseback through wild country, until he reached the vicinity of Belgrade. In a wagon in a wood, he was granted audience by a gypsy voivode, whose authority transcended national borders.
Creighton continued eastward and spent a night as guest of a certain count of ancient lineage, lord of a picturesque castle in Transylvania. In Vienna he met with several people, including a woman reputed to be the most skilled courtesan in Austria, with the fairest body in Europe, but the substance of their meeting was unrelated to such matters.
By the fifteenth of July he had reached St. Petersburg. Although the Russian capital was racked by workers’ strikes, he succeeded in spending several hours talking with a monk celebrated for both his holiness and his political connections.
On the twenty-third, when Austria issued its ultimatum to Serbia, Colonel Creighton arrived in Paris, having wasted a couple of days in a cave in the Black Forest. Paris was in the throes of the Caillaux scandal, but he ignored that, conferring with two artists and a newspaper editor. He also took an overnight train south to Marseilles to visit Fort St. Jean, European Headquarters of the Foreign Legion. He spent most of his time there in the chapel, then returned to the capital.
On July 28, when Austria declared war on Serbia, he obtained a berth on the next boat train to London—a surprising feat, considering the near-panic in the Gare du Nord.
On reaching England, he completely disappeared.
2
EDWARD ARRIVED IN G
REYFRIARS ON THE 4.15 FROM London. It was the Saturday of August Bank Holiday weekend, and the little station was almost deserted. Paris had been in panic. London was a riot of trippers fighting their way out of town, heading for the seaside. Greyfriars was its usual sleepy country self.
He emerged from the station, bag in hand, to find the Bodgley Rolls at the curb, with Bagpipe himself at the wheel.
Edward said, “Damned good of you to put me up, Bodgley,” and climbed in.
Bagpipe said, “Good to see you, old man. Care to go for a spin?” He was trying not to swallow his ears at being allowed to drive the Rolls.
So Timothy Bodgley drove Edward Exeter home to Greyfriars Grange by a somewhat roundabout route, but took care that they arrived in decent time to get ready for dinner. Edward thanked Mrs. Bodgley for taking him in at such short notice—and at his own request, of course, but that part of it was too painful to mention. She insisted he was always welcome.
Then there was a gap. This is a common result of head injuries.
He retained no record at all of the next hour. After that came a few scattered images of dinner itself, random pages saved from a lost book. His most vivid recollection was to be of his own intense embarrassment at being in blazer and flannels, like a stray dog that had wandered into the thoroughbred kennel. One of his cases had been stolen in Paris, and he had had no time to hire evening clothes on his dash through London. He had had no English money, either, and the banks were closed on Saturdays.
The nine or ten faces around the table remained only a blur. The Bodgleys themselves, of course, he knew well: Bagpipe and his parents—the large and booming Mrs. Bodgley, and the peppery general with his very red face and white mustache. There was a Major Someone, an ex-India type. There was a Dowager Lady Somebody and the vicar. And others. The scraps of conversation he did remember were all about the imminence of war. The major explained at length how easily the French and the Russians between them would roll up the Boche. Everyone agreed it would all be over by Christmas.